“Human beings love lists, because they create a sense of order in a chaotic world,” author Shaun Usher told me this week. I was asking him about his new book Lists of Note, the follow-up to his bestselling Letters of Note. It is a beautiful and immensely satisfying book. A collection of lists by the famous, the infamous and the anonymous. From Johnny Cash’s to-do list (“1. Not Smoke 2. Kiss June 3. Not Kiss Anyone Else…”) to the list of parts Galileo needed to build his telescope in 1609 and a list of reasons not to work written by the slaves in the Valley of the Kings in ancient Egypt. It is a fascinating and revealing glimpse into their lives and hopes.

Shaun is quite right. Lists are wonderful precisely because they create the happy illusion of order. They suggest that life is a process which we can control. As a natural planner and a dreamer, I have always loved them. Every New Year I make a huge one filled with everything I want to do, try or keep doing in the year to come. Writing it all down feels like the first step to making things happen. Even if only on paper, at that moment, my hopes exist. There is power in naming things, I have always believed that. I can’t help noticing, though, that for all my forethought and good intentions, the biggest and best things in my life happened entirely by accident.

My family is one example. People use the phrase “planning a family” a lot. But you can’t plan families, not really. “Trying for a baby” (a prim euphemism that always makes me feel icky) is closer to the mark. It’s a spin of the roulette wheel. You don’t get to choose when or if it happens, as anyone who has struggled to conceive or experienced miscarriage knows. And if it does, then what? Which baby? A stranger, every time.

Then there’s music. From the beginning I loved it wholeheartedly and without any expectations, but it has shaped my life. My interest in it was indulged by my parents as a reward for all the schoolwork I had to do. I was clever and we all expected that I would go to university, but music led me to London. Eventually I got a job playing records on the radio and met a boy whose collection was better than mine.

This week I spent an evening with the man our eldest son is named after. One of the Holy Trinity of Jameses: Brown, Marshall Hendrix and Newell Osterberg. The last of these, better known as Iggy Pop, was giving this year’s BBC Music John Peel lecture and it was my privilege to host the coverage.

Of course, my job is unusual. Extrapolating any kind of generalisation from my sinuous path of employment would be a terrible idea. All the same, I can’t help wondering how unusual my experience is. How much say do any of us get in our (I hesitate to use the word about myself) careers? Isn’t the final say always someone else’s, whether they are your boss or your customer?

I still love making plans, mind you. Being clear about what you want is important; adaptability and strategy are a good combination (as Eisenhower put it: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”), and I still believe that there is power in naming things. When my son is older I hope the James I gave him serves as a reminder that loving something is (usually) a good enough reason to do it.

Iggy ended his BBC lecture by saying: “The best things in life are free” – perhaps they are also free from our control.